Book description
Richard Mabey's sparky, offbeat book is about canny and inventive
making-do, or 'busking in the kitchen'. Whether creating a cassoulet
which uses English ingredients, making bread from chestnuts or
slow-cooking a Peking duck in front of an ancient fan heater, he
encourages us to be daring and imaginative in our cooking and our
approach to food.
Although it contains wonderful, mouth-watering recipes like broad
bean hummus, pumpkin soup and fillet-steak hearts this is more than a
recipe book - it is a guide to a whole new way of thinking that
embraces scrumping, celebrates picnics, and revels in saving energy
wherever it can, whether that's by one-pot feasts or cooling on car
radiators. After all, if you care about food 'life's too short not to
stuff a mushroom'.
Previously published in hardback as The Full English Cassoulet.
Among Richard Mabey's acclaimed publications are Food for Free
(his first book and never out of print), Gilbert
White (Whitbread Biography of the Year) and the ground-breaking
bestseller Flora Britannica, which won the British Book Awards'
Illustrated Book of the Year and the Botanical Society of the British
Isles' President's Award and was runner-up for the BP Natural World
Book Prize. He collaborated on Birds Britannica (which was his
idea) and Nature Cure, described as 'A brilliant, candid and
heartfelt memoir', had such wide appeal that it was shortlisted for no
fewer than four prestigious prizes: the Whitbread Biography, the J. R.
Ackerley for autobiography, Mind (for its investigation into
depression) and the Ondaatje Prize for the evocation of the spirit of place.
Richard Mabey was born and brought up among the beech woods of the
Chilterns, and now lives in Norfolk.
